Wednesday February 1, 2006 9:34 pm

Adobe On Mactel: An FAQ

I know there are a lot of Mac users reading the blog, so for those of you (like me), who use Adobe apps as part of your daily workflow, you may want to read this. The following is from an Adobe employee blog written by John Knack.

Yes, we are working on Universal versions of our tools. The FAQ includes a list of those being converted.
No, we don’t plan to update CS2/Studio 8 to be Universal. That means native support will come in a future version, which is some time off. (The FAQ cites an 18-24 month historical cycle for product updates. CS2 shipped in April 2005, Studio 8 in September.)
Yes, most of today’s applications will run in Rosetta (the emulation layer for PowerPC code running on Intel), though that’s not a configuration Adobe has tested extensively. The Version Cue server component won’t run on Rosetta.

The Lightroom beta, made available first on Mac, will be available in Universal form very soon.
It’s important to make a few things clear: We’re working really hard, together with Apple, to make this conversion. Apple staff are on site at Adobe every day and have been for quite some time, helping our teams make the required move to the Xcode development environment & taking our feedback on how to make Xcode support large projects like Photoshop.

Everyone—Mac users, Adobe, and Apple—wants to get Adobe apps running natively on Mactel as soon as possible, but doing so while maintaining their quality will take time. If we knew how to do this more quickly, we would do it.

I’d like to make one other point: in the first 18 months that Mac OS X was in the market (starting with the shipment of 10.0.0), Adobe released (by my recollection) 13 OS X-native applications. That averages out to better than one release every six weeks for a year and a half. Name another company that showed up for the game on that scale. Please bear that history in mind the next time someone on a user forum starts raising doubts about Adobe’s commitment to the Mac.

So the short of it is, if you are working as a professional designer or anyone who uses Adobe’s apps fairly frequently, make sure you know what you are getting into when buying that new Mactel. I for one am looking forward to a new MacBook Pro soon - real soon - but I absolutely must have Adobe’s apps work on my machine from day one. I hope they pound this out pronto.